by Zara Kesterton, @ZaraKesterton
Toni Bucky came across T.844–1974 in the Victoria and Albert Museum during her PhD research into blackwork embroidery. She was hunting for evidence of the geometric stitching, usually completed in black thread on linen, which became popular in England during the sixteenth century. In the V&A collections, Toni found an unstitched piece of cloth covered in ink markings of flowers, birds, and insects. Its curved sides suggest that it was once a coif, a tight-fitting cap worn by women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At first, Toni disregarded it because it was not embroidered. However, careful examination of tiny needle marks in the cloth revealed that the embroidered thread had been painstakingly unstitched.
This ‘Unstitched Coif’ became part of a group artwork in which Toni sent out a call for stitchers to interpret the cloth in their own way. Toni initially expected around 40 participants, but her social media post ended up reaching hundreds of individuals and stitching groups around the world. In the end, 77 stitchers submitted their coifs for display in an exhibition in Sheffield. The V&A had agreed to accept 40 coifs into their permanent collection, so a group of 40 stitchers was selected to become the ‘core’ group, with fine Italian linen and embroidery thread issued to them. The rest of the embroiderers worked with their own materials and completed the projects just for fun.
I was thrilled to be part of the project and enjoyed learning the techniques of blackwork embroidery, which was new to me. My PhD looks at representations of flowers in eighteenth-century French fashion, so although the Unstitched Coif was from several centuries earlier, the variety of realistic and stylised flowers in the design appealed to me.
The Unstitched Coif call for stitchers was designed as a collective art project, rather than a historical reconstruction. However, I found it interesting to reflect on how much I learned from the experience of stitching the coif and how it impacted on the way I think about the textiles that I study. Usually, historical reconstructions involve setting clear research questions and goals before embarking on a project, and often requires intensive investigation into materials and techniques to ensure the reconstruction is as close as we can possibly get to the feel and process of making the historic object. I did not go into the Unstitched Coif with any research questions. My colours and methods were entirely self-chosen rather than guided by historical accuracy. That being said, the meditative process of stitching brought home to me just how much time and skill was required to make this everyday item of clothing, which was often hidden under an outer layer of headwear. It is easy to see why a garment embroidered with blackwork was a popular gift between spouses and lovers, since the investment of time makes it a real labour of love. (It is sometimes said that Katherine of Aragon, who popularised blackwork at the English court, continued to embroider Henry VIII’s shirts in the style even during his attempts to annul their marriage.)[1]
As I sewed, I wondered where the designer had drawn their inspiration from, and why they had chosen certain elements – such as a squirrel, with only appears once in the otherwise roughly symmetrical design (fig. 3). Was the little creature which a seemingly mischievous, surprisingly human face inspired by a squirrel that the designer had seen in a book or in their garden? What had the embroiderer been thinking about as they stitched, and then carefully unpicked their work? I found it a challenge to decide the pattern with which to work each new leaf, flower, and creature, and to space out the colours evenly. I wondered whether the original maker faced the same dilemma, and whether they pulled out their stitches because they weren’t happy with how their decisions had turned out.
One thing that really affected my progress as I worked on the coif was the environment in which I sewed. I started the embroidery in the big, light-filled learning space at the V&A, and then worked on the train on the way home, sitting next to the window as the early summer light started to fade. I continued working in my student room at Jesus College in an armchair next to an enormous sash window. When I moved in September, however, my smaller windows and the trees surrounding my house – as well as the darker evenings – made it much harder for me to work on the embroidery. I could only stitch for an hour or so at a time before my eyes felt tired. I can’t imagine how it would have been possible by candlelight, and without the magnifying lamps that many embroiderers use today. Blackwork is certainly a summer activity!
I never finished embroidering my coif. The name of the project was ‘unstitched’, and in the end, other craft projects (such as making a May Ball dress) and my PhD work got in the way. I managed to finish about a third of the coif before time came to submit our work in early November.
After the coifs went on display in Sheffield, I got an exciting email from Susan North, the senior curator of textiles at the V&A, to say that she would like to accept all the coifs into the permanent collection of the museum. I was thrilled, but also slightly horrified that my amateur unfinished work was going to be forever kept in the hallowed stores of my favourite museum! I asked if I could take the coif back to finish it, but Susan remarked that many historic artworks in the V&A’s collection are unfinished. These incomplete works offer an intriguing glimpse the process of making, and indicate the time required to finish stitching even a relatively small garment. Thus persuaded, I signed the Deed of Gift forms and handed my work over to the V&A collections.
As I tried to wrestle with my feelings of thwarted perfectionism, I thought about how most items in museums from the nineteenth century or earlier were not created with the intention of being preserved in a collection. Would the (un)maker of the Unstitched Coif have felt frustrated that her abandoned work had ended up in a museum? Or pleased that hundreds of stitchers had attempted to finish what she had started? Would she have agonised over the placement of the pattern and wondered if she should have spent more time trying to finish it?
When we discuss museum objects in our work, we often characterise them as professional or amateur, well-made or unskilled work. The process of stitching the unstitched coif brought home to me that the work that ends up in a museum collection may not be something that the maker is particularly proud of, or their best work. They might have been experimenting with a new technique or maybe they got bored halfway through. Art often ends up in museums through a variety of convoluted ways, and – particularly for textiles made, designed, and stitched by women in the past – we sometimes don’t know the maker’s name or have enough surviving examples to compare the item with the rest of their body of work. In the published book of the Unstitched Coif project, the stitchers (who were mainly women, their ages ranging from early 20s to their 80s) reflected on their feelings of pride in their embroidery, but also often commented on the compromises they had to make, and other factors that got in the way of doing their best work.[2]
In a hundred years, my unstitched coif might be the only trace of my embroidery that has been preserved. I would much rather that one of the dresses I have spent weeks making, or the thesis that I will spend years writing, would end up looked after by museum staff – but that is out of my hands. Whatever happens, I feel so privileged to have been part of the Unstitched Coif project, and the things I have learned through doing this embroidery have influenced the way I think about the textiles that have survived (and those that haven’t) in museum collections.
Cover image: Unstitched coif in linen and ink, late 1500s or early 1600s. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. T.844–1974
Further Reading
- Toni Buckby, An Unstitched Coif… (© Toni Buckby and named artists, 2023).
- Project website, ‘Blackwork Embroidery’, https://blackworkembroidery.org/.
- V&A Collections, ‘Panel, 1600–1630’, T.844–1974. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O357609/panel-unknown/.
- Lesley Wilkins, Beginner’s Guide to Blackwork (Search Press Classics, 2020).
[1] Royal Collection Trust, ‘Katherine of Aragon, attr. British School, 16th century’. Last accessed 11 March. https://www.rct.uk/collection/404746
[2] Toni Buckby, An Unstitched Coif… (© Toni Buckby and named artists, 2023).
Doing History in Public 